Poignant and well written, but with a slim premise and insufficient character development.
A woman from LA heads to London in search of her on-again, off-again lover’s possessions after his untimely death.
Julia and Gabe meet in a summer arts program in Barcelona right before they head to college, after his mother, Leora, a poet who’s teaching in the program, introduces them, and they have a summer fling. However, the book opens with Julia at Gabe’s funeral, 12 years in the future. She has a successful jewelry-design business, and he is—well, was—an indie star known as Separate Bedrooms. She also tells us that just one month before Gabe died, they slept together, long after their first fling and unbeknownst to Gabe’s recent ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth, who lives in London and manages a bespoke floral studio as well as a hip restaurant. Readers will learn all of this as Julia sets off for London, prodded by Leora to rescue the older woman’s cherished guitar. At first Julia tries to appear blasé with Elizabeth, but after a series of blunders, they decide to join forces and find the three things Leora wants: the guitar, a baseball cap, and a piece of sheet music. Julia tries not to let on what she wants to find for herself: a medical bracelet she once made for Gabe, who had “situs inversus,” meaning his internal organs were reversed. Author Muharrar seems to want to show that Julia’s feelings are reversed, but it doesn’t work in the brief window the women have, just a couple of days until Julia’s return to the U.S. There isn’t enough time for us to understand Julia’s adult self, even with flashbacks to other times her life intersected with Gabe’s. Nor is there enough space for Elizabeth to come to life beyond her chic exterior. Muharrar’s fluid writing promises interesting future work, but this book might have remained a short story.
Poignant and well written, but with a slim premise and insufficient character development.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780593655849
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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